The flight was not quite two hours, Turkish Airlines, and they did their very best to take care of us but in not two hours there really isn't time for the entire plane to be served an entire hot meal, with the fresh rolls and the heated little towels and i asked for coffee and they said after the food but then after the food we landed? So there was no coffee. And the Istanbul airport was mostly unremarkable except for the Very Large Crowd of people meeting people coming off flights - sure, Istanbul is bigger than Vienna, but the Vienna airport is what we're used to by now and you can pretty much always see everybody coming out from the customs doors, it's not a big place, but the line of people after Turkish customs was massive, hundreds of meters long. It was pure luck that we found the right hotel shuttle guy - coming out of customs there were two doors opening out of the secure part with the tape and a wall of people and you have to pick a side. And of course by then E was trying to escape, but only a little bit. E is a champion traveller - you just make a hand puppet out of the vomit bag (a Sharpie marker woulda come in really handy for that) and you let her rip pieces out of the inflight magazine (especially if there are pictures of horses, or of dogs, or elephants, or lions) and we literally did not even crack the bag o' toys. On the under two hour flight, each way, but still.

The hotel was one of many Best Westerns in Istanbul, but this particular one was exactly halfway between the Sultanahmet Mosque (that's the Blue one) and the Hagia Sophia (and also, happily, next to a certain Cafe Turquoise, or Turquoise Cafe, or something like that) and the location, the location was spectacular. We could have walked anywhere we wanted if it hadn't been raining, to the castle, to the bazaar, all the museums, catacombs, tombs, the Hippodrome. Those calls to prayer we heard from the steps? Those were from the seventeenth-century Blue Mosque. So we dumped the bags and of course immediately went to the Blue Mosque.

I can. not. overstate. how incredibly beautiful it was. There is a shot of me and E staring up with our mouths open, both of us pointing in different directions, and, really, that's pretty much the experience. (Though i think it was out of focus and we might have deleted it.) I think i am used to Viennese architecture, all Baroque flourishes and Gothic gingerbread, so while Austria is certainly very pretty and has very good examples of all that it's not really something that takes one's breath away, any more. Even the old Roman ruins are just there in the subway station and if you're not pointing them out to somebody that hasn't seen them there's really no point; an urn is an urn is an urn. But this - you can't look away. And then when you do, there's something else you can't look away from. It goes up and up and up with the circles and circles and windows and it's just so much nicer than a cathedral to my aesthetic - more organic, more personal. Exedra - i love exedra. If there is anything that could make me believe in a particular god it is a clerestory and some nice exedra. And the tiles - later we went to a ceramics shop and we came home with one, single tile, quartz something, handpainted whatever, there's a certificate, and for this one tile we paid a whole lot of money. And the entire interior surface is covered with these tiles. And there is a giant carpet, the whole floor. And you're in freaking Turkey, in a massively holy old mosque, you know they spared no expense on the carpet. And six minarets, and the whole place is carved and painted, all picked out in gold, lots of gold, and there's stained glass and deep chandeliers all over the place and little screens with barefoot Muslims praying behind them and us (also barefoot) tourists whispering self-consciously outside.

From there we went to the Hippodrome - M's parents, who we were travelling with, had a book on Istanbul we'd been flipping through - and there it is, the Obelisk of Theodosius, from the fifteenth century BC. And in very fine condition, thank you very much, for being Kingdom Egypt and being moved all over the world. And there's more monuments, a snake column with the heads missing by now, a fancy gazebo, a lot of rosebushes in full bloom in December. Between the Blue Mosque and the Ayasofya is one of those dancing fountains, a big park, more roses and fenced-off grass and chestnut vendors with long-used evil eye pendants swinging from the canopy. Benches to sit on and watch the dancing fountain. Sultan's tombs, carpet museums, holy relics. A thousand tour guides hoping to meet you.

We had dinner next door at the Turquoise place and it was delicious. They brought E something - baklava? sure - full of honey and pastry except she liked the bread better, of course, and they do all these delicious things with eggplant and tomato and i LOVE eggplant and tomato, and there is lamb, and i LOVE lamb, and there was bread, and heck, i LOVE bread. And interestingly lots of apparently Turkish food - they don't always list the beilagen on the menus, so then you order something and surprise! you have a very traditional thing, and look, it all comes with french fries. So E liked the fries, too, and the lamb, and the eggplant, and they have cheese, of course, so she was happy. And they have clementine oranges, and apples at the hotel breakfast that we borrowed, so she was happy. And there are also cats, everywhere, and you're never quite sure if they're exactly tame or not until the maitre d comes and picks up one of them and brings it to the baby and leans over so she can pet him too and introduces, This cat's name is Lazy, he's ours, and it's this tiny, perfect, very cuddly kitten, and E loves it. So the entire rest of the time in Istanbul she was trying to pet all the cats. Which were everywhere.

There was a crib in the hotel. Did we use it? Hah. E had a bit of a cough - she'd had it already a day or three but it wasn't bad at all - but even with the familiar orange IKEA blanket from home she wouldn't sleep in the crib for more than the first maybe three hours, and then she'd wake up just enough to not know where she was and start hollering, and then she'd want to come in our bed and stay there. But we had a big enough bed and at least the calls to prayer you couldn't really hear in the room, that i noticed, so that didn't wake her up. Except sleeping with a baby attached, i don't know if it's worse if you're not used to it or if you have to do it every night, but uuugggnnnhhh, every morning i was sore, my neck, my shoulder, but since we're just feeding on the one side, now, just one shoulder, in one certain way ... Didn't need the crib. That's the point.

The next day we'd signed up with one of the tour guides for a boat ride on the Bosporus with a bit of car tour in between except since the car tour bits were in a van, we didn't bring the car seat, since what - we bring the car seat, it gets completely stolen, and then we're screwed in Fethiye, let alone all of France, where car seats are actually required, unlike Turkey - anyway - the entire car ride, poor E was screaming, unless she was nursing. And it's all city cobblestones and historic streets and we're not going fast, at all, just bumping over very uneven bumps, and the second the stupid van stopped she was done screaming and perfectly happy, so i think she was carsick. She must have been: she was happy at that cemetery with the incredible view, she was happy on the cable car down to the water, she was happy (well, she was sleeping) on the boat. The Bosporus is a little insane: you look at one side, and oh, that's Europe, that's nothing special. And you look on the other side and it doesn't look any different (houses, estates on the water, mosques, minarets, little gulet fishing boats scatter in front of the biggest boats i have ever seen) except oh, well shit, that's Asia. That over there is a different continent. Which i have never been to before. The first time i went to a different continent i was nine - ten? - and flying in to Munich and i was so excited i didn't sleep the whole redeye flight, but instead stayed up playing chess with the little old man across the aisle, but then i was a kid and could deal with not sleeping. So that was Asia. And there are palaces, estates, fantastic things on the Bosporus, and you think it would be this wonderful thing to have one of those houses and in your head you say, when i win the lottery the seventh time, i can afford that white one with the deck. Except you can't swim in the river because there is this very weirdly high concentration of jellyfish: and the tour guide says, they're not so bad to get stung by, but no, we don't swim here. Shipping channel, too, i guess, and when you're on the Black Sea maybe you don't need a river to swim in. I can believe that. Anyway, it was cold and rainy and we were all in coats, and there were lots of palaces on the river.

We bought a wool-on-wool double-knotted carpet and a silk-on-silk little square that M really liked. I got to pick the proper, useful, everyday carpet. It is red and blue and yellow and has big, fairly "modern" i guess, nomad-y patterns and is in the front hallway and it is supposed to last forever or anyway fifty or sixty years - that is what the guys in the carpet shop said. I told M that he was deliberately acquiring a doily but he wanted the blue silk square anyway and it is beautiful and we are going to have it framed because i am damned if i am going to use a silk doily that i paid that much for and then put something on it. The inlaws bought a carpet, too, a big flower-patterned one.

We had lunch at a little street place and then in the guidebook found a giant cistern, so we went and saw the giant cistern, and it was long and wide with many columns, and if they haven't filmed a movie there, then they should, and there were a couple of Medusa heads, and there were goldfish in the water. But our camera was out of batteries (not for the first time, either). Big, long, red cistern.

E had a bit of a cough so then I stayed in and very carefully didn't read the Salman Rushdie book (Midnight's Children, so far i recommend it) which i had very carefully left in Vienna but instead the book i had brought by John Irving (the Hotel New Hampshire) and the ones i'd borrowed from M's parents, and M went to one of the Turkish baths (a new one: only three hundred years old, this one!) and had a nice bath and a soak and steaming. As a special Turkish souvenir, when you go to this particular bath, they give you a pair of new boxer shorts and a comb. Interesting, that. And the cough got worse over the night and around four in the morning we finally decided, enough of this, we need a doctor, so we went downstairs and M talked to the receptionist and they picked a hospital as someplace that would (a) be open and (b) maybe speak English and called us up a taxi and wrote it all down for the taxi driver and we trucked over to the hospital with more awful cobbledystones, and poor E was angered by the cobbledystones, but she was so exhausted with the coughing, and we got to the hospital and she was still perfectly happy (we'd gotten out of the car! everything was great!) that they didn't quite get why we were there until she started coughing again, and then, Oh. So we got a nice English-speaking pediatrician that was on duty and a couple of nice non-English speaking nurses in this very nice, very empty pediatrics emergency ward in a private German-built hospital, postwar i think, anyway, they decided she had croup and she got a shot and three nebulizer treatments, and seeing two different doctors and all the friendly nurses trying (and, mostly, succeeding) to make her laugh, and one of the nurses had a baby that was just the same age (which we determined from her cell phone pictures). We were in the hospital just long enough to know that we'd really really missed the breakfast at the hotel, as it only went to eleven o'clock and i think it was at least a twenty minute cab ride, though with E being so hollery about it, it might have seemed longer than it was. We got to take the nebulizer mask home with us and with cab fare both ways included it was all just over €100, and if we filled out the right paperwork we might yet get reimbursed for the hospital costs.

Anyway she was quite a bit happier, so we decided that i could go to Topkapi palace in the afternoon and then at night M could go out and wander around the city and try to take shots of the Blue Mosque and Ayasofya at night, which he'd been itching for. So the inlaws and i signed up for another tour guide for another mosque and some historical bits and the palace and the harem and what have you, and the other mosque was the Solloku Mehmet Pasha Mosque, and i'm not sure if it was still an active mosque or not because nobody told us (even the native Turkish, and certainly also Muslim albeit a modern one, tour guide) to take off our shoes or cover our womanly-beguiling hair, but anyway the tiles here were really something, too. I took pictures of them. Um, of course. And more gold painted calligraphy, and also on the tour were a bunch of Spanish speaking kids and a couple of Urdu speaking guys from somewhere in India, also Muslim, but of course the Indians also spoke English and they could read the calligraphy which the tour guide couldn't do and so they were reading all the calligraphy to me (it was all verses from the Koran, There is no god but Allah, and Mohammad is his messenger, et c) and were very helpful and friendly. And so then we went in Topkapi Palace and it was very nice, we went in the harem and there were more tiles, tiles and tiles and tiles, and one is a little jealous of that Dutch princess who complimented the tiles and then was given a whole roomful of them, but there were still more tiles, hundreds of years old, these Izmir tiles, and the colors are still so bright!, and all the calligraphy done in gold, different styles of calligraphy from all over the Ottoman empire, the names of the sultans, the viziers, bits of the Koran. And the sultan - he is my kind of king: in so many of the rooms in the harem, mother-of-pearl inlaid cabinets for books and books and more books, in every room. And there was a building for his cabinet and whatever audiences there were. And the privy chamber, with relics - i never know how i should feel about relics: if that is a fragment of somebody's beard, and if i have no specific thoughts on the owner of the beard, then do i care if that is a fragment of it? But the treasury: like Vienna, the Ottoman Empire had a lot of opportunities to get some very pretty and very BIG jewels from all over their roaming lands and as presents from other rulers. Some very impractical armor, studded with all kinds of fanciful things. A dagger made famous by some movie with a couple of big (Big.) green rocks. An eighty-six carat diamond. A shoebox-sized crystal thing full of emeralds and something else - chrysoberyls? - seventy, eighty carats each, and shiny and properly cut at that. Was interesting to see the history of gems being cut: big shiny rocks by weight hundreds of years old (especially the ones on the armor, with no light going through), not near as sparkly as smaller, more recent ones.

And then we traded off and i went back and stayed with E and M took the camera through the dark, spotlighted city. She slept a lot better and on the doctor's advice we took to steaming the baby quite regularly (the hotel room didn't have terribly good ventilation: so if one took a hot hot hot shower bath et c., and left the bathroom door open, it got rather humid in the bedroom part, and she usually sleeps through the sound of water running, which helped, too) and we didn't have to go back to the hospital and she was coughing slightly less every day, and slightly less every night, afterwards, until we got to the French Alps and she finally stopped entirely just in time to avoid treatment by the Actual Chiropractor Friend who Might have Also Helped, Had it Been Necessary (ACFMAHHBN, for future reference) to cuddle her a little bit.

Anyway, the next day we'd contracted with the Topkapi Palace tour guide for a private tour through the Hagia Sophia and the Grand Bazaar for twenty bucks. E had slept well enough and was coughing less, so we all went, with her in the Ergo; we hadn't brought the stroller and even though she's used to the Vienna cobblestones it would have been a pain. Plus who thinks you can take a streetwheeling stroller in a mosque? Yeah. So it was raining, again, so we drove, again, to Ayasofya, which was a church first and then a mosque and is now a just plain museum. And even with a quarter of it being completely draped off for reconditioning or something, it. was. big. Bigbig. A hundred and eighty-two feet high, a hundred and two feet across. Very large and wide and very high up and you really see what they mean when they say that architecturally it shouldn't be possible at all to make a giant cavebuilding like that, with all the windows, still. And after the splendor of the Sultanahmet Mosque, the Hagia Sophia is not in very good condition, that you can see its age painted on with the crosses and the lines, you can trace faultlines through the air from all the earthquakes. Little bits of history from who repaired it when, mosaics in a certain specific style, paintings, the calligraphy shields. More cats, inside, unsurprisingly by now. The marble, red and black and green and yellow and brown and gray and purple, and the gold. And the dome - the big dome on the top - it floats. Dizzyingly hovers, there, so far up.

When we were finished looking at things that you couldn't believe how far away they were, the tour guide took us through the crowded rabbit-warren of the Grand Bazaar, the jewelry section, the silver section, the silk section, the leather section, the fake Prada section. (She had a favorite fake Prada store, but we didn't go in.) It was a maze. The silver bits were through this tiny hallway that if we were any wider than we were, it would be a one-way hallway. And we saw something that the tour guide called the Istanbul stock exchange, which was a bunch of people shouting and answering multiple cell phones in the middle of the hallway, and it really was a stock exchange. The whole place was massive chaos.

And then M's parents bought another carpet, and the next day we left for the coast of the Aegean.

Labels: toddler, travel

*not very factual on motorcycles either

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